


Pigs

by PoisonKisses



Category: Poison Ivy (Comics)
Genre: Original Character(s), Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-31
Updated: 2018-01-31
Packaged: 2019-03-11 17:23:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13529028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PoisonKisses/pseuds/PoisonKisses
Summary: A quick Lovecraftian Poison Ivy story.





	Pigs

“It was the pigs.” The man’s gnarled hands trembled--working man’s hands. Calloused. Rough. Large. Like rough blocks of wood tanned and darkened in endless summer suns. They trembled as he fumbled to pull a cigarette from a crumpled soft pack. His eyes were dark. Sunken. Pits of black in his old face, like the rocks that jutted out from the hard bluffs of the Ozark mountains, sun bleached, only a stone’s throw away. Wisps of thinning gray hair fluttered in the warm spring breeze, and she waited.

“Something...something got in ‘em.” His accent was thick and southern, molasses running slowly down a tree trunk next to the quicksilver of the accents in the northeast, the ones she was used to. It reminded her vaguely of her mother’s soft drawl, mother--a word, a person she rarely thought about these days. “I don’t know. Jesse found this...found this thing. Like a statue. We thought it was Indian. It was old. I don’t know. It was…” his voice was rambling, his rheumy-eyed gaze gone unfocused as he thought back, replaying things in his head. “It was _wrong._ ”

She only nodded. It was as she suspected, just a confirmation, but it was always helpful to have all the data. “How long?” She didn’t need to clarify.

“Mebbe a week?” He wasn’t sure, it was question as much as statement. “Ever since they started bulldozing into them bluffs. To build the new pig farm, y’see?”

She did see. “You mean the new corporate pig farm? The huge one?”

He nodded, taking a drag on his cigarette, one that he’d barely touched, the one he’d been shaking too badly to actually smoke, and that he’d let burn down almost to his wrinkled old fingers.

“I can’t…” and he pronounced it as though it rhymed with ‘paint,’ “I can’t go back up there. Somethin’ ...somethin’ is wrong with Jesse.” She knew that would be his grandson, a Jesse that hadn’t been to school in over a week. 

Nothing more could be gained from him. His mind, his spirit were broken. She knew the signs. 

The drive up to the old farm was slow, a winding gravel road the only way. Around her, the thick woods encroached. They waited, silent, like a held breath. There was no song to greet her, no relief, no joy. Something was coming and the trees knew it, knew OF it. These woods were no comfort--not any more. There was a darkness here. The trees were afraid.

She was almost relieved when the forest broke, cleared pasture on a relatively flat piece of land--an island in the dark forest, isolated from any human comfort. A small house that must’ve stood for several decades, a barn even older, and a newer tool shed. There was a chicken coop, a few pig wallows. Several pigs were roaming unfettered in what amounted to the home’s front yard but they stopped as she pulled up, putting her car in park. They stared at her, completely devoid of fear, their beady eyes focused on her.  
Somewhere in the distance a couple of dogs began to bark. The wind here made a moaning sound as she exited her car. The pigs continued to stare, their bodies motionless. 

There was hate in their eyes.

The ancient wood of the screen door was a sickly grey from years of being sun bleached, and it banged open with a shriek of rusty metal spring and a crash of rickety wood as the boy came out.

He was fifteen, she knew that from the internet, but his hair was more gray than his grandfather’s. He’d been thin before but now the best word she could think to describe him was _emaciated._ It was as though something was feeding on him. His stomach was sunken in, ribs prominent, limbs long and bony and wiry strong. His face was fixed in rage, an old man’s face, withered and narrow and jaundiced, eyes dripping with fear and suspicion. He leveled a rifle at her, the metal of the barrel shaking. She ignored it. Guns were the least of her worries.

“Who the fuck are you?” His voice was too young, cracking from puberty, for his old body. 

“Where is it?” She answered with a question of her own, but it wasn’t entirely necessary. She could sense _it_ inside the house, brooding and waiting. It knew. It knew she was here.

For just a moment, through the horror and madness, Jesse’s eyes peered out of that dessicated old face. “I didn’t...I didn’t know. Please..” he managed.

It was time, and she shrugged out of the hooded cloak she was wearing, a living cloak of leaves and vegetation, the only plants here that still sang to her, and she passed him, swatting the gun out of his nerveless hands and pushing past him.

The little house was squalid, reeking of spoiled food, vomit, shit. She ignored that, zeroing on the thing with senses that defied humanity, defied reality, senses rooted in everything that was green and alive, full of the love of clean sunlight and pure water. It was in the boy’s bedroom, a miasma of human filth and piles of rubbish he’d built into a sort of altar for the it.

It was a piece of some unidentifiable stone, jet black, and formed into a vaguely humanoid shape, crouching on crude legs ending in cloven hooves. Its misshapen arms raised up as though exalting something dark, it’s head vaguely porcine, with sunken pits where its eyes should have been. It was hugely, grotesquely male, and it radiated a hatred of all that lived, all that loved, all that was green, all that was _female._

All that she was.

It made her skin crawl, and she was loathe to touch it, but she was more reluctant to touch it with a friendly vine. Steeling herself, she grasped it with one hand and had to fight the urge to vomit, but she picked it up nonetheless. 

It hated her but she smiled grimly, full lips curling up with wicked mirth, as she turned to leave.

It was afraid of her.

Jesse was lying on the ground, face down, unmoving. The pigs had formed a semi circle around the porch, watching her when she stepped out, their eyes narrow and cruel. She wasn’t surprised when one spoke.

It’s voice was deep and hollow, as though it were echoing up from one of the deep caverns that dotted the hills and valleys of the mountains here. “You cannot have us.”

“You are not welcome here, Greensinger.” A different pig.

“You have made a mistake, May Queen.” Yet another.

“We will defile your body and destroy your mind.” A boar, larger than the others, mottled pink and brown.

She tossed her head, she would not show them fear, and ran a hand through her thick, red curls. “And who is we?”

“We are we. We are Legion. You will come to know us all. We will enjoy breaking you.”

She laughed, and they bristled. “Come then, swine. I do not fear you.” She held her hand to the side, singing softly to the living vines that crisscrossed her sleek arms, and they began to wrap together, forming into the Sword. A ripple of fear went through Legion.

“Come and die.”

With shrieks that were part pig and part carrion bird, they charged, but she was ready. The Green was with her, and she was not afraid. She wielded the Sword with grace and strength, and as they leaped and charged, seeking to gore her with savage, poisoned tusks, she cut them down, sliced them away from her, dancing elegantly and spraying the thick, black ichor from their wounds over the yard. It smoked where it landed, and she was thankful the grass here had long since died.

She stood, surrounded now, but several of the pigs lay still, the rest panting, their wounds smoking, fear and respect warring with hate in their eyes. She was breathing evenly, the song of the Green in her ears. She was mighty.  
“You cannot win, whore,” a pig said.

“You are few, and we are many,” a different pig.

“You are just a woman.” The boar.

“Then why are you still talking, Legion? I’d like to kill you some more.”

The boar roared--a bone-chilling screech that shattered the windows of the little house. The other pigs turned to it and then they ran together. She backed away, nauseous, as the swine fused, flesh running like melting candle wax, bodies flowing into one. It smelled sour, and she wrinkled her perfect nose as the pigs became an abomination, a gestalt horror that had no place in this or any world, a monstrosity from before time, when human and beast and plant alike feared the inky darkness between the stars. Tusked mouths and beady eyes, drool and blood and shit, claws and stamping hooves and disgusting erection. It towered over her, screeching its male superiority, proud and smug and self-righteous in its hate.

“You cannot win! Everything you love will wither and we will laugh!”

She backed up, letting it see the naked fear on her face, letting it see what it expected. It took a thundering step and charged her, the ground shaking each time what passed for its legs thudded to the ground. Her heart was pounding in her chest as she danced away from it, dodging blows that would have flattened Amazonian princesses. It was death incarnate, avatar of that which would unmake everything.

But the Green was with her. She could feel it, the songs of thousands of trees and plants on the edge of her senses. They sang to her, strengthening her. She was their champion. She was the May Queen, the Queen of Life itself, and as the Swine Prince, as Legion, swung again, her Sword darted in almost delicately, but it took chunks of mortified porcine flesh with each swing, and Legion screamed in agony, its blows faster but clumsier, desperation and terror fueling its rage.

It knew the Green was with her now. It knew her fear was false.

It lurched into the corner of the little house as she sprang to the roof, the tip of the Sword flicking out like the tongue of a snake at the monster’s mutated head. She saw the old propane tank in the backyard sitting like an old metal egg in a nest of dead weeds. The horror swung both fists at her, and she leaped delicately, floating on the wind like a dandelion seed.

She found the gun where Jesse’d dropped it. 

Blinded with rage, the creature didn’t realize its danger. She called on the Green, bringing new life to the weeds, and a massive stalk lifted the tank with ease. She made a motion with her arm, and the stalk matched it, heaving the tank into Legion’s chest. On instinct, the unclean thing crushed it, puncturing it. It realized its mistake when she leveled the gun at it.

“No. No we are many, you are no one. No! This is OUR world” It was almost whining.

She sneered.

“Welcome to the new world.” She pulled the trigger.

The explosion was deafening, the shockwave enough to bowl her over, but the massive ball of fire completely engulfed the unclean spirits, cleansing fire purging the taint of Legion from the world. Almost instantly, she felt the plants breathe a sigh of relief, the world of living, growing things in the immediate area peaking out, daring to hope.

Her work here was done, and she let the Sword fade back into the sweet vines and blossoms it had been. She helped Jesse sit up and he stared at her, something like awe and love in his eyes. She smiled at him, smiled at the face already looking more youthful as his grandfather’s battered old pickup truck pulled up. With a shudder, she picked up the unclean effigy and started toward her little car.

Jesse ran to the old man, and she was opening her door and tossing the thing into her passenger seat when he spoke, his voice choking with emotion.

“Wait. Miss? What was that thing?”

She debated how to answer. Wondered if he could even understand. After a moment she murmured in answer.

“‘For he said unto him, Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit.

And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many.

And he besought him much that he would not send them away out of the country.

Now there was there nigh unto the mountains a great herd of swine feeding.

And all the devils besought him, saying, Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them.’”

At the man’s confusion, she continued. “This evil came from that,” and she pointed to where the planned pork farm would be, where the earth movers and log trucks were already at work. “Stop it. Vote. Protest. Do what you can to see that they don’t get their way.” She turned and picked up her cloak, throwing it around her with a flourish. “There are many kinds of pigs in the world. Not all of them oink and produce bacon.”

“Wait,” the man called. “I don’t even know who you are!”

She stopped and looked back at him, the gusting breeze catching her blood red curls, just a hint of a smile on her full lips. “I am the May Queen, the bloody claws and fangs of the Green.”

“I am Poison Ivy.”


End file.
